The Cords of Vanity. A Comedy of Shirking Page 20

"Well, well!" said Mrs. Vokins, comfortably; "and who's a-beating?"

  I looked up. I must protest, until my final day, I could not help it.

  "Why, we is," I said.

  And Nannie Allsotts giggled, ever so slightly, and Warwick Risby had half risen, with a quite infuriate face, and I knew that by to-morrow the affair would be public property, and promptly lost the game and rubber. Afterward we had our supper.

  When the others had gone—for my footing in the house was such that I, by ordinary, stayed a moment or two after the others had gone,—Elena Barry-Smith came to me and soundly boxed my jaws.

  "That," she said, "is one way to deal with you."

  A minute ago I had been ashamed of myself. I had not room to be that now; I was too full of anger. "I did make rather a mess of it," I equably remarked, "but, you see, Nannie had shown strength in diamonds, and I simply couldn't resist the finesse. So they made every one of their clubs. And I hadn't any business to take the chance of course at that stage, with the ace right in my hand—"

  "Arthur would have said, before he'd thought of it, 'You damn fool—!' And then he would have apologised for forgetting himself in the presence of a lady," she said, in a sorry little voice. "Yes, you—you have hurt me," she presently continued,—"just as you meant to do, if that's a comfort to you. I feel as though I'd smacked a marble statue. You are the sort that used to take snuff just before they had their heads cut off, and when they were in the wrong. And I'm not. That's always been the trouble."

  "Elena!" I began,—"wait, just a moment! I'm in anger now—!" It was not much to stammer out, but for me, who have the Townsend temper, it was very hard to say.

  "You talk about loving me! and I believe you do love me, in at any rate a sort of way. But you'll never forget, you never have forgotten, those ancestors of yours who were in the House of Burgesses when I hadn't any ancestors at all. It isn't fair, because we haven't got the chance to pick our parents, and it's absurd, and—it's true. The woman is my mother, and I'll be like her some day, very probably. Yes, she is ignorant and tacky, and at times she is ridiculous. She hadn't even the smartness to notice it when you made a fool of her; and if anybody were to explain it to her she would just laugh and say, 'Law, I don't mind, because young people always have to have their fun, I reckon.' And she would forgive you! Why, she adores you! she's been telling me for months that you're 'a heap the nicest young man that visits with me.'"

  Afterward Elena paused for an instant. "I think that is all," she said. "It's a difference that isn't curable. Yes, I simply wanted to tell you that much, and then ask you to go, I believe—"

  "So you don't wish me, Elena, in the venerable phrase, to make an honest woman of you?"

  She had half turned, standing, in pink and silver fripperies, with one bared arm resting on the chair back, in one of her loveliest attitudes. "What do you mean?"

  "I was referring to what happened the other night, after the Allardyce dance."

  And Elena smiled rather strangely. "You baby! how much would it shock you if I told you no woman really minds about that either? Any way, you have broken your solemn promise," she said, with indignation.

  "Ah, but perfidy seemed, somehow, in tone with an establishment wherein one concludes the evening's entertainment by physical assault upon the guests. Frankly, my dear"—I observed, with my most patronizing languor, —"your breeding is not quite that to which I have been accustomed, and I have had a rather startling glimpse of Lena Vokins, with all the laboriously acquired veneering peeling off. Still, in view of everything, I suppose I do owe it to you to marry you, if you insist—"

  "Insist! I wouldn't wipe my feet on you!"

  "That especial demonstration of affection was not, as I recall, requested of you. So it is all off? along with the veneering, eh? Well, perhaps I did attach too much importance to that diverting epilogue to the Allardyce dance. And as you say, Elena—and I take your word for it, gladly,—once one has become used to granting these little favors indiscriminately—"

  "Get out of my house!" Elena said, quite splendid in her fury, "or I will have you horsewhipped. I was fond of you. You would not let me be in peace. And I didn't know you until to-night for the sneering, stuck-up dirty beast you are at heart—" She came nearer, and her glittering eyes narrowed. "And you have no hold on me, no letters to blackmail me with, and nobody anywhere would take your word for anything against mine. You would only be whipped by some real man, and probably shot. So do you remember to keep a watch upon that lying, sneering mouth of yours! And do you get out of my house!"

  "It is only rented," I submitted: "yet, after all, to boast vaingloriously of their possessions is pardonable in those who have risen in the world, and aren't quite accustomed to it…." There were a pair of us when it came to tempers.

  8

  And I went homeward almost physically sick with rage. I knew, even then, that, while Elena would forgive me in the outcome, if I set about the matter properly, I could never bring myself to ask forgiveness. If only she had been in the wrong, I could have eagerly gone back and have submitted to the extremest and the most outrageous tyranny she could devise.

  But—although I would never have blackmailed her, I think,—she had been mainly in the right. She had humiliated me, with a certain lack of decorum, to be sure, but with some justice: and to pardon plain retaliation is beyond the compass of humanity. At least, it ranks among achievements which have always baffled me.

  22. He Cleans the Slate

  1

  It was within a month of this other disaster that Jasper Hardress came to America, accompanied by his wife. They planned a tour of the States, which they had not visited in seven years, and more particularly, as his forerunning letter said, they meant to investigate certain mining properties which Hardress had acquired in Montana. So, not unstirred by trepidations, I met them at the pier.

  For I was already in New York, in part to see a volume of my short stories through the press—which you may or may not have read, in its elaborate "gift-book" form, under the title of The Aspirants,—and in part about less edifying employments. I was trying to forget Elena, and in Lichfield it was not possible to induce such forgetfulness without affording unmerited pleasure for gabbling busybodies…. It was not in me to apologise, except in a letter, where the wording and interminable tinkering with phraseology would enable me to forget it was I who was apologising, until a bit of nearly perfect prose was safely mailed; and I knew she would not read any letter from me, because Elena comprehended that I always persuaded her to do what I prompted, if only she listened to me.

  As it was, I talked that morning for an hour or more with fat Jasper Hardress…. Even now I find the two errands which brought him to America of not unlaughable incongruity.

  2

  For, first, he came as an agent of the Philomatheans, who were endeavouring to secure official recognition by the churches of America and England of a revised translation of, in any event, the New Testament.

  He told me of a variety of buttressing reasons,—which I suppose are well-founded, though I must confess I never investigated the matter. He told me how the Authorised Version was a paraphrase, abounding in confusions and in mistranslations from the Greek of Erasmus's New Testament, which, as the author confessed, "was rather tumbled headlong into the world than edited." And he told me how the edition of Erasmus itself was hastily prepared from careless copies of inaccurate transcriptions of yet further copies of divers manuscripts of which the oldest dates no further back than the fourth century, and is in turn, most probably, just a liberal paraphrase, as all the others are, of still another manuscript.

  So that the English version, as I gathered, may be very fine English, but has scarcely a leg left, when you consider it as a safe foundation for superiority, or pillorying, or as a guide in conduct.

  I suspect, however, that Jasper Hardress somewhat overstated the case, since on this subject he was a fanatic. To me it seemed rather quaint that Hardress or anybody else should be
bothering about such things.

  And as he feelingly declaimed concerning the great Uncials, and explained why in this particular verse the Ephraem manuscript was in the right, whereas to probe the meaning of the following verse we clearly must regard the Syriac version as of supreme authority, I could well understand how at one period or another his young wife must inevitably have considered him in the light of a rather tedious person.

  And I told him that it hardly mattered, because the true test of a church-member was the ability to believe that when the Bible said anything inconvenient it really meant something else.

  But actually I was not feeling over-cheerful, because Jasper's second object in coming to America was to leave his wife in Sioux City, so that she could secure a divorce from him, on quite un-Scriptural grounds. Hardress told me of this at least without any excitement. He did not blame her. He was too old for her, too stolid, too dissimilar in every respect, he said. Their marriage had been a mistake, that was all,—a mismating, as many marriages were. She wanted to marry someone else, he rather thought.

  And "Oh, Lord! yes!" I inwardly groaned. "She probably does."

  Aloud I said: "But the Bible—Yes, I am provincial at bottom. It's because I always think in nigger-English and translate it when I talk. It was my Mammy, you see, who taught me how to think,—and in our nigger-English, what the Bible says is true. Why, Jasper, even this Revised Version of yours says flatly that a man—"

  "Child, child!" said Jasper Hardress, and he patted my hair, and I really think it crinkled under his touch, "when you grow up—if indeed you ever do,—you will find that a man's feeling for his wife and the mother of his children, is not altogether limited by what he has read in a book. He wants—well, just her happiness."

  I looked up without thinking; and the aspect of that gross and unattractive man humiliated me. He had reached a height denied to such as I; and inwardly I cursed and envied this fat Jasper Hardress…. I would have told him everything, had not the waiter come just then.

  3

  And the same afternoon I was alone with Gillian Hardress, for the first time in somewhat more than two years. We had never written each other; I had been too cautious for that; and now when the lean, handsome woman came toward me, murmuring "Jack—" very tenderly,—for she had always called me Jack, you may remember,—I raised a hand in protest.

  "No,—that is done with, Jill. That is dead and buried now, my dear."

  She remained motionless; only her eyes, which were like chrysoberyls, seemed to grow larger and yet more large. There was no anger in them, only an augmenting wonder.

  "Ah, yes," she said at last, and seemed again to breathe; "so that is dead and buried—in two years." Gillian Hardress spoke with laborious precision, like a person struggling with a foreign language, and articulating each word to its least sound before laying tongue to its successor.

  "Yes! we have done with each other, once for all," said I, half angrily. "I wash my hands of the affair, I clean the slate today. I am not polite about it, and—I am sorry, dear. But I talked with your husband this morning, and I will deceive Jasper Hardress no longer. The man loves you as I never dreamed of loving any woman, as I am incapable of loving any woman. He dwarfs us. Oh, go and tell him, so that he may kill us both! I wish to God he would!"

  Mrs. Hardress said: "You have planned to marry. It is time the prodigal marry and settle down, is it not? So long as we were in England it did not matter, except to that Faroy girl you seduced and flung out into the streets—"

  "I naturally let her go when I found out—"

  "As if I cared about the creature! She's done with. But now we are in America, and Mr. Townsend desires no entanglements just now that might prevent an advantageous marriage. So he is smitten—very conveniently—with remorse." Gillian began to laugh. "And he discovers that Jasper Hardress is a better man than he. Have I not always known that, Jack?"

  Now came a silence. "I cannot argue with you as to my motives. Let us have no scene, my dear—"

  "God keep us respectable!" the woman said; and then: "No; I can afford to make no scene. I can only long to be omnipotent for just one instant that I might deal with you, Robert Townsend, as I desire—and even then, heaven help me, I would not do it!" Mrs. Hardress sat down upon the divan and laughed, but this time naturally. "So! it is done with? I have had my dismissal, and, in common justice, you ought to admit that I have received it not all ungracefully."

  "From the first," I said, "you have been the most wonderful woman I have ever known." And I knew that I was sincerely fond of Gillian Hardress.

  "But please go now," she said, "and have a telegram this evening that will call you home, or to Kamchatka, or to Ecuador, or anywhere, on unavoidable business. No, it is not because I loathe the sight of you or for any melodramatic reason of that sort. It is because, I think, I had fancied you to be not completely self-centred, after all, and I cannot bear to face my own idiocy. Why, don't you realize it was only yesterday you borrowed money from Jasper Hardress—some more money!"

  "Well, but he insisted on it: and I owed it to you to do nothing to arouse his suspicions—"

  "And I don't hate you even now! I wish God would explain to me why He made women so."

  "You accuse me of selfishness," I cried. "Ah, let us distinguish, for there is at times a deal of virtue in this vice. A man who devotes himself to any particular art or pursuit, for instance, becomes more and more enamoured of it as time wears on, because he comes to identify it with himself; and a husband is fonder of his wife than of any other woman,—at least, he ought to be,—not because he considers her the most beautiful and attractive person of his acquaintance, but because she is the one in whom he is most interested and concerned. He has a proprietary interest in her welfare, and she is in a manner part of himself. Thus the arts flourish and the home-circle is maintained, and all through selfishness."

  I snapped my fingers airily; I was trying, of course, to disgust her by my callousness. And it appeared I had almost succeeded.

  "Please go!" she said.

  "But surely not while we are as yet involved in a question of plain logic? You think selfishness a vice. None the less you must concede that the world has invariably progressed because, upon the whole, we find civilisation to be more comfortable than barbarism; and that a wholesome apprehension of the penitentiary enables many of us to rise to deaconships. Why, deuce take it, Jill! I may endow a hospital because I want to see my name over the main entrance, I may give a beggar a penny because his gratitude puts me in a glow of benevolence that is cheap at the price. So let us not rashly declare that selfishness is a vice, and—let us part friends, my dear."

  And I assumed possession of the thin hands that seemed to push me from her in a species of terror, and I gallantly lifted them to my lips.

  The ensuing event was singular. Gillian Hardress turned to the door of her bedroom and brutally, as with two bludgeons, struck again and again upon its panels with clenched hand. She extended her hands to me, and everywhere their knuckles oozed blood. "You kissed them," she said, "and even today they liked it, and so they are not clean. They will never again be clean, my dear. But they were clean before you came."

  Then Gillian Hardress left me, and where she had touched it, the brass door knob of her bedroom door was smeared with blood….

  4

  When I had come again to Lichfield I found that in the brief interim of my absence Elena Barry-Smith, without announcement, had taken the train for Washington, and had in that city married Warwick Risby. This was, I knew, because she comprehended that, if I so elected, it was always in my power to stop her halfway up the aisle and to dissuade her from advancing one step farther…. "I don't know how it is!—" she would have said, in that dear quasi-petulance I knew so well….

  But as it was, I met the two one evening at the Provises', and with exuberant congratulation. Then straddling as a young Colossus on the hearth-rug, and with an admonitory forefinger, I proclaimed to the universe at large
that Mrs. Risby had blighted my existence and beseeched for Warwick some immediate and fatal and particularly excruciating malady. In fine, I was abjectly miserable the while that I disarmed all comment by being quite delightfully boyish for a whole two hours.

  I must record it, though, that Mrs. Vokins patted my hand when nobody else was looking, and said: "Oh, my dear Mr. Bob, I wish it had been you! You was always the one I liked the best." For that, in view of every circumstance, was humorous, and hurt as only humour can.

  So in requital, on the following morning, I mailed to Mrs. Risby some verses. This sounds a trifle like burlesque; but Elena had always a sort of superstitious reverence for the fact that I "wrote things." It would not matter at all that the verses were abominable; indeed, Elena would never discover this; she would simply set about devising an excellent reason for not showing them to anybody, and would consider Warwick Risby, if only for a moment, in the light of a person who, whatever his undeniable merits, had neither the desire nor the ability to write "poetry." And, though it was hideously petty, this was precisely what I desired her to do.

  So I dispatched to her a sonnet-sequence which I had originally plagiarized from the French of Theodore Passerat in honour of Stella. I loathed sending Stella's verses to anyone else, somehow; but, after all, my one deterrent was merely a romantic notion; and there was not time to compose a new set. Moreover, "your eyes are blue, your speech is gracious, but you are not she; and I am older,—and changed how utterly!—I am no longer I, you are not you," and so on, was absolutely appropriate. And Elena most undoubtedly knew nothing of Theodore Passerat. And Stella, being dead, could never know what I had done.

  So I sent the verses, with a few necessitated alterations, to the address of Mrs. Warwick Risby.